Elizabeth I Read online

  21

  LETTICE

  March 1592

  I wore mourning yet again. And this one I felt deeply. A woman might earn the cruel nickname of Merry Widow if she sees the death of a husband as less a loss than a deliverance. This is a common feeling, yet some women disguise it better than others. But there is no mother who welcomes the death of a child, no matter how wayward.

  My youngest son, Walter, was dead, my sweet boy. And he was dead because of the fecklessness of his brother, Robert, and our prideful ambition. Of my four children, Walter alone never gave me sorrow. He was only twenty-two, killed in that inept war with the Spanish in France under the leadership of Robert.

  How pleased we had been with Robert’s appointment! How puffed up with what it signified: The Queen had bestowed a major command on Robert. He was on his way to distinguishing himself militarily and rising above the other courtiers who were confined to the halls of court.

  Not that she had a great deal to choose from. Those fit to command land forces were few. There was Black Jack Norris and then there was ... no one. The sea fighters had dispersed—Francis Drake and his cousin John Hawkins in disgrace from the failed Portugal venture, Richard Grenville dead after a heroic but suicidal one-man battle in his ship Revenge against fifty-three Spanish ships, Martin Frobisher retired to the country life in Yorkshire.

  In earlier days, there would have been a host of fire-blooded young men qualified to take the field. Now there was only Robert.

  Oh, how we had rejoiced over his elevation. His ascendancy over the scrabbling little Cecil now seemed assured. In vain his friend Francis Bacon had reminded us that military command was not the route to power in a Tudor court, and had not been even as far back as Henry VIII’s.

  “And is even less so when the ruler is a woman,” he warned us. “It will serve only to threaten her. She may be a formidable woman, but even she cannot lead troops in the field, and any man she must rely on to do so will incur her resentment rather than her gratitude. She will not admire anyone who makes up for her own lacks.”

  I hated the way Francis came out with his smug observations. I wondered if he was a bad influence on Robert.

  “How can she resent someone for doing her a good service?” Robert had asked, trying on various pieces of his armor to be adjusted. He bent his elbow up and down, testing its flexibility. The hinge creaked. “Will a simple dose of oil cure this, or do the parts need replacing?” he mused.

  “Listen!” I ordered him. Francis’s words were disturbing me. “The purpose of this command is to further your career and your ambitions. I see no other means to do it except by military success. How can you advise otherwise, Francis?”

  “Oh, he should go to war. He makes a fine figure in his regalia, and it will gain him a reputation. But always remember that the Queen may have different goals.”

  “Why, what possible other goals could she have than smashing the Spanish?” Robert looked bewildered.

  “Look in the Bible,” said Francis. “ ‘The heaven for height, and the earth for depth, and the heart of kings is unsearchable.’ ”

  “When did you start reading Scripture, you atheist?” asked Robert.

  “You do not have to be a believer in order to recognize wisdom there,” said Francis. “And don’t call me an atheist. It’s dangerous!”

  “No one’s heart is unsearchable,” I said. “The number of possible motives are usually very few.”

  “Very well then. I shall prepare a paper examining the Queen’s choice of motives. But in the meantime, friend Robert, do as well as you like on the battlefield but do not court popularity here at home on its basis, or she will see you as a rival.”

  “The people do like me,” he noted, delight creeping into his voice.

  “It has been a long time since they had a popular hero,” said Francis. “Leicester remained hated, for all that he was the Queen’s favorite. There was Drake, of course, in his day—and Philip Sidney, who died in time to cement his hold on the imagination. They are hungry for another.”

  “It is your time,” I assured him. “The place is empty. Seize it.”

  At last I could come into my own. My first husband, Walter, had bankrupted himself pursuing glory in that bog of ambition, Ireland, and only got debt and death for his efforts. My second husband, Leicester, had failed miserably in the Netherlands, when power and command were handed him. Now my eldest son would recoup all.

  “Walter wants to come,” Robert was saying.

  “What better opportunity?” I said. “You can oversee him, guide him.”

  Remembering those words was God’s torture for me now. I had urged it; I had encouraged it.

  Walter was killed in September, only a few months after arriving on that fool’s errand of a campaign. He fell into a French ambush when he was making a token sally before the walls of Rouen, hit in the head by a cursedly accurate French sniper. With difficulty his captain rescued the body and returned it to the English camp.

  Having failed to achieve anything, having lost three-quarters of the men, Elizabeth issued her “Declaration of the Causes That Move Her Majesty to Revoke Her Forces in Normandy.” Robert returned home, and together we interred Walter in his vault. That was only a few days ago, and now we passed each other like ghosts, trying to right ourselves as we fumbled along the corridors of the house.

  I was laid low by grief in a way I had never been before. I should have been used to loss; my mother was gone, as well as my earlier husbands and my little son with Leicester. But losing a sickly child is not the same, for in one respect I had anticipated it from the moment I saw his puny frame and knew he was weak. But Walter had grown to manhood with none of the faults of my other children—missing the rashness of my daughters and the instability of Robert, he was closest to my heart. The future had looked glorious for him. Now he lay lapped in marble.

  I told myself I should take comfort in my surviving children, should be plotting Robert’s next moves now that he was back and had no clear path. While he was gone that little weasel Cecil had managed to get himself named to the Privy Council, where my aged father still sat. Next it should be Robert’s turn, if he managed things well.

  But my heart was not in my schemes. I did not even care if I ever went to London and felt no desire to leave Drayton Bassett. It even began to feel soothing to me. It no longer even felt like exile, and the court at London seemed a faraway and threatening place that no sensible person would want to frequent. Perhaps that was the worst part: to have been cast adrift from my former self.

  It was a week since we had laid Walter in his tomb, and today we would return to say final prayers and offer flowers. I had asked both my daughters, Penelope and Dorothy, to come and honor their brother. They joined the family here: me, Robert, Frances and her two children—Elizabeth Sidney, age seven, and little Robert, a year old. As soon as the girls arrived, I felt even worse, for having all the surviving siblings together only emphasized the one that was missing.

  Now, as we gathered in the hall, I looked hard at Penelope and Dorothy. Both were stunning beauties. Once I had taken great pride in that. Now I felt like Niobe, that foolish woman who bragged about her children only to have the envious gods strike them down one by one. Penelope was pushing her golden curls up under her hat, fussing with wayward strands. Her delicate, long fingers were pale and ornamented with only finely wrought rings. The dark fabric of her gown was in perfect taste for the somber occasion but fashionably cut. Her husband, Lord Rich, pampered her—with worldly goods, that is. Penelope had not wanted to marry him, but he could offer financial enticements as well as his title, and I am ashamed to say that her father and I insisted on the marriage. But they lived apart now, she calling him a violent man, and there were rumors she had taken up with my husband’s distant cousin, Charles Blount. It felt slightly incestuous even to think about.

  Dorothy had managed to incur the Queen’s anger when she married Sir Thomas Perrot without royal permission. The years h
ad not made the Queen relent. Dorothy accepted it and seemed content with Perrot, which was a good thing, after the price she had paid to marry him.

  Less flamboyant in dress than her sister, she was just as striking. Her hair was a reddish blond and her features more regular than those of Penelope, who had a long, albeit elegant, nose.

  Alas, new motherhood had not improved Frances Walsingham’s looks—I would always call her that in my mind, never Frances Devereux. She was still so plain that it is difficult to describe her. How can one differentiate her from the thousands of other plain women in the realm? Her daughter by Philip Sidney was equally colorless; already any hope she had of growing into good looks had vanished. Like mother, like daughter. Her son with Robert, my grandson Robert, was a winning little thing, but he was only a year old, and at that age, all babies are winning. I hoped my son’s good looks would drown out Frances’s dullness as he grew up.

  “It is time.” The household chaplain, an earnest young man, appeared in the hall. We followed him out and walked silently to the chapel. The sky was overcast; the trees still bare. Mud oozed up between the bricks on the path, glistening as we trod upon it.

  Beside me Christopher took my hand. He had been a bystander during this difficult time, not knowing how to comfort me for my loss of a part of my life before he had known me.

  We entered the chapel, the gloomy day making it hard to see inside. The tomb was beckoning, its marble looking too raw, shouting out its new contents. The carvers had just finished with the epitaph and marble dust lay on the base, missed by the sweepers.

  “Let us give thanks for the life of Walter Devereux,” the priest intoned.

  After he had finished mumbling his prayers, Robert stepped forward. “I wished to write a poem for my brother,” he said. “When I was already laid low by the fever in France, they brought me word of his death, and I sickened so all thought I would join him, and two coffins be shipped home. I survived, but I could not find the words to frame a proper poem. So I will recite one written by another.” He closed his eyes as if to read the words in his mind.

  “My tale was heard and yet it was not told,

  My fruit is fallen and yet my leaves are green,

  My youth is spent and yet I am not old,

  I saw the world and yet I was not seen;

  My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,

  And now I live, and now my life is done.”

  His voice had begun to tremble, and he reached out to the edge of the tomb to steady himself.

  “I sought my death and found it in my womb,

  I looked for life and saw it was a shade,

  I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,

  And now I die, and now I was but made;

  My glass is full, and now my glass is run,

  And now I live, and now my life is done.”

  One by one we went up to the tomb and laid our wreaths and tributes upon it. Then the horrid moment was over, and we could leave this sunless chapel.

  Dusk had come, and we were together for our supper, my scattered children under one roof again. As I looked at each of them, their present adult faces wavered and were replaced by the round ones I had known when they were small. There was, suddenly, a great peace about it.

  “That poem,” said Penelope. “Where did you get it, Robert?” She was cutting her meat carefully, and I remembered her daintiness as a child, refusing to eat anything with fat on it.

  “Chidiock Tichborne,” he said.

  “The traitor?” said Christopher drily.

  Robert looked up with consternation. “He was a poet. I know not of traitor.”

  “Don’t play the innocent. He was executed as one of the conspirators in the Babington Plot,” said Christopher.

  “One that my father brought to justice! Robert, how could you speak his words at your own brother’s tomb?” Frances had actually spoken out, and sharply. I was astounded.

  “When he wrote of the tomb on the night before his execution, he knew whereof he spoke,” insisted Robert. “I judge him only as a poet.”

  “Then you’re a fool. Never do that again. What if the Queen hears that you quote a man who wanted to assassinate her?” said Penelope. “Do you want to ruin this family?”

  “I do not think she would take offense,” insisted Robert.

  “She takes offense more easily than almost anyone I know,” I said. Even as I spoke, I wondered if some spy might report my words. But I was still in the stage of not caring what happened to me. “She banished me from court and I remain banished, even though the cause of the offense is dead, and I am her near cousin. She remains angry at Dorothy. As for her other grudges and vendettas, the list is so long I could not name them all.”

  “Even if you could, I would not advise it,” said Dorothy quietly.

  “ ‘Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber: for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter,’ ” said Frances. “When my father was alive, he was the bird who flew to the Queen. Now we do not know who they are.”

  “Your father’s loss was a great one to the Queen as well as to us,” said Robert, reaching out to touch her hand. “Whoever fills that empty space will put the Queen in his debt.”

  Robert, making an astute political observation; Frances, speaking up—I was taken by surprise. Had I misjudged them, or had they changed?

  After the meal, my girls—I kept calling them that, even though they were in their late twenties—drifted off together, leaving the men, Frances, and me to the fire in a privy chamber. Now that the family ceremony was over, Francis Bacon joined us, and another man I did not recognize.

  “My brother Anthony,” said Francis, pushing him forward.

  The man almost hobbled as he approached me. “An honor, Lady Leicester.” I had been allowed to retain my highest title, Countess of Leicester, rather than being demoted to plain Lady Blount, wife of a knight. His voice was thin and raspy at the same time, as if it had to travel a long way from his concave chest. He turned to Robert and nodded. “My lord,” he said.

  “Welcome,” said Robert. He seemed more sure of himself, taking over the role of host from me.

  “Anthony has just returned from France, as have you, dear Robert,” said Francis. Unlike his brother’s, Francis’s voice was smooth, strong, and seductive. “You served the Queen on the battlefield and he served her in more shadowy venues,” he said. “He had the good fortune to be ... associated ... with the work of your late father, Frances.”

  “So he was a spy?” Frances said. “Pray speak plainly. There are no birds here to fly to court.”

  What had got into her? Had she taken up the mantle of her father?

  “Please, I do not merit that title,” said Anthony, swaying on his feet.

  I motioned for Robert to slide a chair over for him, and he sank down upon it, relief spreading across his face. He was clearly in bodily distress. “For ten years I gathered information for Secretary Walsingham. Not only from France, but from all over the Continent. France was a convenient collecting station. But changing conditions there, and my poor health—” He gave a hooting, raucous series of coughs and ended by mopping his mouth with a handkerchief.

  “My brother is now in a position to transfer his services here,” said Francis. “And we, if we are wise, will know how to use them.”

  “My wife says to speak plain,” said Robert. “Pray do.”

  “Do I have your absolute word that the wood lining these walls”—He thumped the wall behind him—“is as far as my answer goes?”

  “Of course, man! Speak up!” said Robert.

  “Very well. It is so simple I am astounded you have not proposed it already. It is this: The great Secretary Walsingham is dead. He who protected the Queen for so long, who broke conspiracy after conspiracy and crowned his achievement with the challenge of ensnaring Mary Queen of Scots, in legally irrefutable proof, has left a great void. The Que
en is naked—so to speak—before her enemies. There is no one who has been able to replace Walsingham.”

  “Nasty little crookback Cecil has tried to manage the network Walsingham left behind,” said Christopher, who usually remained silent in political exchanges.

  “It is in tatters,” said Francis. “It is like a faithful hound that only obeyed one master. We must construct a new spy system and run our own intelligence service. In that way we will win not only Her Majesty’s gratitude but power as well. Power to vanquish the Cecils and make our own fortune.” He looked knowingly at Robert. “Will you authorize this? We will work for you. You will present the findings to Her Majesty.”

  Robert’s face was blank. His eyes shifted from one face to another, as if asking permission. I nodded, locking my eyes with his. This was the way. This was where the battles would be fought. I felt a stirring of excitement in me at the challenge and, along with it, relief that I could feel anything again.

  “My father had five hundred spies in fifty countries in his network, as far away as Constantinople,” said Frances. “Can you ever match that?”

  “Indeed, yes, I have been managing many of those very strings of informers,” said Anthony. “I know how to do it.”

  “My father died horribly in debt,” said Frances. “He paid for much of the service himself. The Queen wanted protection but was unwilling to pay for it. Father’s motto was ‘Knowledge is never too dear.’ That was before the bills came due and his purse was empty.” Her voice rose.

  Robert attempted to put his arm around her to quiet her, but she pushed it away.

  “Indeed, yes, that is the weak spot in my proposal,” said Francis. “How to pay for it. We are all somewhat short of funds.”

  What an understatement. Christopher and I were reduced to pawning my jewelry, and the Bacon brothers were eking out livings as a lawyer at Gray’s Inn and as a poorly paid secretary to a poorly paid secretary.